Academic Civics: What Does It Mean to Be a Citizen of Your University?
Adam T. Smith | 08 July 2026 | Inside Higher Ed
The current pressures on American universities have produced something unexpected: a genuine opportunity to establish a new kind of civic commitment that can bind the university together even as a wave of pressures threatens to pull it apart. Across campuses, students, faculty, staff, administrators and trustees are paying attention to their institutions in ways they rarely do in quieter times, asking what universities are for, what they are committed to and what kinds of communities they wish to be. Universities have the civic frameworks required to reverse ingrained patterns of alienation and disengagement; the challenge is to activate them.
Over the last nine months, a group of 18 Cornell University faculty were charged by the provost with divining the Future of the American University amid a moment of extraordinary disruption driven by AI, a collapsing relationship with the federal government and the erosion of public trust in our teaching and scholarship. In countless meetings, town halls, deliberations and debates, we constantly found ourselves returning to a common theme: The future of the American university depends on a reinvention of the principles of solidarity that bind the academic community together…